Rate My Professor Kirsten Jung

Prof. Dr. Kirsten Jung has been the Chair of Microbiology and Professor in the Faculty of Biology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München since 2004. She completed her studies in Biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, where she received her Dr. rer. nat. in 1988 for her dissertation on the characterization and regulation of L(-)-carnitine metabolism in Escherichia coli. From 1992 to 1994, she conducted postdoctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, supported by a DAAD fellowship. Subsequently, she served as a scientific assistant and Heisenberg fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the University of Osnabrück from 1999. Prior to her appointment at LMU, Jung was C3 Professor of Microbiology at the Technical University of Darmstadt from 2002 to 2004.

The research of Jung's Molecular Microbiology Group centers on the molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial perception of environmental stimuli and stress adaptation. Key areas include acid stress sensing in Escherichia coli and γ-proteobacteria, regulation of primary metabolite uptake and excretion such as pyruvate in Escherichia, Salmonella, and Vibrio via histidine kinase/response regulator systems, the role of RNA modifications in stress responses, translation elongation factor EF-P and its post-translational modifications, and identification of intracellular targets of natural compounds affecting quorum sensing and chemotaxis. Prominent publications from her group encompass "Translation elongation factor EF-P alleviates ribosome stalling at polyproline stretches" (Ude et al., Science, 2013), "Histidine kinases and response regulators in networks" (Jung et al., Current Opinion in Microbiology, 2012), "Ribosome profiling reveals the fine-tuned response of Escherichia coli to acid stress" (Schumacher et al., mSystems, 2023), and "Direct RNA sequencing of the Escherichia coli epitranscriptome uncovers alterations under heat stress" (Riquelme-Barrios et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2025). Jung has received the Prinzessin-Therese-von-Bayern-Preis in 2019, and her group was awarded the PHOENIX Wissenschaftspreis in 2020. She contributes to LMU's governance as a member of the University Council and the Center for Advanced Studies Board, and serves as speaker of the DFG Graduate Research Training Group 2062 on Molecular Principles of Synthetic Biology.